Diary of a Country Cinephile

Viewing Log: 6/1/11 - 6/30/11

2011-06-30T09:22:00.003-04:00

6/28/11 LE BICHES (Claude Chabrol, 1968)
6/28/11 LE BOUCHER (Claude Chabrol, 1970)
6/27/11 FULL METAL JACKET (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
6/25/11 BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (John Sturges, 1955)
6/25/11 DIRTY HARRY (Don Siegel, 1971)
6/23/11 HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PT. 1 (David Yates, 2010)
6/20/11 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (Eric Rohmer, 1972)
6/19/11 ADVISE & CONSENT (Otto Preminger, 1962)
6/18/11 NOTRE MUSIQUE (Jean-Luc Godard, 2004)
6/18/11 BODY DOUBLE (Brian De Palma, 1984)
6/17/11 HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
6/16/11 BADLANDS (Terrence Malick, 1973)
6/16/11 IMITATION OF LIFE (Douglas Sirk, 1959)
6/14/11 THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES (Stan Brakhage, 1962)
6/14/11 DOG STAR MAN (Stan Brakhage, 1962)
6/14/11 WEDLOCK HOUSE: AN INTERCOURSE (Stan Brakhage, 1959)
6/14/11 DESISTFILM (Stan Brakhage, 1955)*
6/12/11 EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL (Werner Herzog, 1970)
6/11/11 THE GENERAL (Buster Keaton, 1927)
6/11/11 MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (Woody Allen, 2011)
6/11/11 THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick, 2011)
6/11/11 BLOW OUT (Brian De Palma, 1989)
6/10/11 THE LADIES MAN (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
6/8/11 SCARLET STREET (Fritz Lang, 1945)
6/4/11 GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (Howard Hawks, 1953)*
6/2/11 THE SOFT SKIN (François Truffaut, 1964)
6/2/11 SHADES OF FERN (Frantisek Vlácil, 1984)

*rewatch

BLOW OUT (Brian De Palma, 1981)

2011-06-11T23:05:00.008-04:00

Previous De Palma's Seen: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, OBSESSION, SCARFACE

BLOW OUT is a conspiracy thriller in the direct tradition of REAR WINDOW and THE CONVERSATION. Antonioni's BLOW-UP is an obvious citation, but De Palma's film, while harboring some semblance of cultural critique, is far less indebted to the European art-house than to bold, extravagant American genre cinema. From the gratuitous murders (one of which is so superfluous in its sadism that it lowers the film in my estimation) to the red-white-and-blue color patterning to the jarring camera movements, De Palma communicates loudly in broad visual strokes. His protagonist (John Travolta) used to wire undercover cops before a grisly accident befell the department's best officer, and he is now a sound designer for a low-budget video production company specializing in cheap exploitation films. Witness to a car accident that leads to the death of a political candidate and having recorded what appears to be a gun shot, Travolta finds a way out of the tedium of his low-rent job and back into the thrills that characterized his police-work. If his obsessive quest to revitalize his numbing existence by embarking on a murder-uncovering quest is reminiscent of James Stewart in REAR WINDOW, then the bitter lack of closure and ultimate tragedy of THE CONVERSATION defines the haunting conclusion, in which the pieces never really fall together and an emotional tragedy surmounts the resolution of the mystery. De Palma, as he did when he re-appropriated VERTIGO in OBSESSION, places the themes of REAR WINDOW in a new context. Just as the incapacitated Stewart enlisted love interest Grace Kelly in his exploits to expose the murderer, so too does Travolta send out Nancy Allen to do his dirty work as he listens from a distance. Stewart found his brand of artistic fulfillment in his own backyard, but Travolta overreaches to the tragic misfortune of his lover. And yet Travolta does achieve a form of artistic fulfillment, injecting the auditory remains of the tragic affair into the Z-grade slasher flick he derided at the film's beginning. You could say that this final image of an awe-struck Travolta mesmerized by the final outcome corresponds to De Palma himself, an artist who finds art where camp and sublimity intersect.

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS | Otto Preminger | 1950

2011-04-10T00:39:00.006-04:00

This is a noir that hits me in the same way that The Big Heat hits me. it has a surface layer of film noir tropes and moods that immediately wins it over to me. The photography is dark and gloomy, the taxicabs stop right in front of the camera lens, that parking garage goes on forever, those big-city backdrops fill the eyes with luminous wonder. The title is immediately gripping, especially when matched to the illustrative opening credits. From the get-go you can tell you're in for a good noir in every superficial way that matters, and when it comes to this genre, those are often the aspects that I take most seriously.

But there's so much more going on here. Dana Andrews is a notoriously tough cop with daddy issues, out to prove that he's the reverse of his criminal father by relentlessly going after Scalise, a mob boss the old man had helped set up. But we only get this information after Andrews has accidentally killed a suspect by knocking him out, fracturing the steel-plated skull the man had obtained during the war. From this point onward, it's impossible to see the man as a hero, and Preminger tackles the issue of whether there really is a line between 'cop and killer,' the phrase that Scalise uses in the film's harrowing climax. This isn't simply an internal morality play; the lieutenant played by Karl Malden seems equally despicable in his eagerness to close the case by pinning the murder on Gene Tierney's affable father, and while Scalise is responsible for the murder of a gambling associate, there is otherwise nothing tangible outside of his snarling charisma that gives us grounds to judge him. This latter point makes Andrews' resolution to pin him for the murder he himself committed particularly damning.

The moment that Andrews does murder the suspect is an important one. Unlike in Anatomy of a Murder, another Preminger film in which the consequences of a single act of violence proliferate out and color multiple people who elude definitive moral judgment, the murder is definitively depicted, and all queries about it afterward hold little mystery for us. However, the dramatic irony and the suspense it generates are often unbearable, and it is never possible to know how things will end up. I can't think of a similar Hollywood film in which the protagonist is so clearly doomed from the start, and not because of any external or cosmic force, but because of his own fault. Preminger treats the event with such moral seriousness, that you know that there will be no Hollywood loopholes that allow everyone to get out unscathed, and so the remainder of the film had me transfixed on the screen, probing Andrews' character for damning or redemptive traits that would help guide me to some sort of opinion on how I hoped the story would end up. To the very end, not only could I not expect what would happen, but I could not determine what I wanted to happen either.

After the murder, Preminger spends his time establishing a web of characters who have been affected by Andrews in some way. Tierney's father idolizes him; it turns out the friendly old cab driver assisted him in a case several years back. The man is endearing but overzealous in his love for his daughter and a spinner of exaggerated yarns. Andrews looks down on him for his enthusiasm and blatant fabrications, but when the man is booked for the murder, it is Andrews and not the cabbie who is withholding the truth. The owner of a shoddy restaurant who recalls Thelma Ritter's character from Pickup on South Street has a playfully antagonistic relationship to Andrews, who sent her husband away for wife-beating. In fact, everyone who resorts to unnecessary violence ends up getting punished, either by the law or by the mob, and Andrews is no exception.

And finally, moral ambiguity seeps out of every crevice of the story. Does Andrews feel genuine remorse for killing the suspect, or is it simply a feeling of distaste for acting so much like the father he has a deep-seated hatred for? Is his valiant assault on Scalise, conducted as a self-sacrificial means of extricating Tierney's father, not also a cowardly and irrational way for him to settle all of his psychological issues? The ending, in which he finally confesses, even after everything has been settled, is a moment of moral transformation. His motive for doing so can no longer be linked to the demons the story has propped up to complicate our attitude towards him, and Tierney's assurance that she will give him all the chances in the world is so lovely it makes me want to cry.

Exploring Cassavetes: FACES

2011-04-09T21:42:00.002-04:00

Faces is probably my least favorite of the four Cassavetes films I've seen, but if Shadows has taught me anything, it's that a re-watch will probably increase my appreciation substantially. For Ray Carney, however, Faces is possibly Cassavetes' grand achievement and the ultimate distillation of his philosophy of selfhood as a process of interaction and even more potent than Shadows because of the force of its anguish and devastation. In Carney's analysis of Faces, he repeats his past mistakes of exaggerating his dichotomous view of cinema and illustrating how Cassavetes is an immensely more complicated and humanistic filmmaker than the likes of Welles and Hitchcock. Outside of a few explications of quoted dialogue, Carney rarely examines specifics and instead prefers to reiterate his grand thesis ad infinitum, albeit each time with a different modification of language. Ultimately, it feels as if you have spent pages reading the same thing, that the characters can only discover themselves in relation to the people they interact with, and that the downside of self-mutability is the danger of codifying one's performance into a stultifying formula.

Again, this is not to say that Carney does not have valuable things to say about Faces, but it seems as if he hopes to convince us more of his and Cassavetes' philosophy of life than the genius of his cinema. It is true that the more he writes about this perspective on human interaction, the more the film becomes clarified, but it would also be helpful if the film received more direct analysis. The most fascinating things he discusses are Cassavetes' refusal to condescend to 'lesser' characters, and his withholding of moral judgment of his characters, a key trait that removes him from the vast majority of Hollywood cinema. Also helpful for me is why he views Chet and Jeannie (Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands) as characters who have found out how to survive in Cassavetes' universe and are able to react to other people without attempting to dominate.

For me personally, the film lacked the slipshod, idiosyncratic endearment of Shadows, nor does it drive the theme of marital collapse as far as A Woman Under the Influence does. However, this is not to criticize it, as it only seems lesser to me in comparison to Cassavetes' other films. It remains a visceral, furious masterpiece that may be the ideal point of entry into Cassavetes' work. Its frenetic camera, band of performers, themes of collapse and self-annihilation, and rapid-fire conversations are certainly part of a whole, and each of these things exists in the rest of his work to some extent. And yet, aside from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, it's the only film of his that I have seen that didn't quite move me to the point of tears. But it is exhausting, engaging, overwhelming in its power, bleak in its view of human relationships, and, seen in the right frame of mind, potentially earth-shattering.

Viewing Log: 3/1/11 - 3/31/11

2011-04-01T11:16:00.007-04:00

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN | Albert Lewin | 1951

2011-03-30T01:50:00.004-04:00

CERTIFIED COPY | Abbas Kiarostami | 2010

2011-03-27T13:35:00.012-04:00

Certified Copy is quite possibly the most enrapturing movie I have ever seen. It is simultaneously intellectual and deeply emotional, and unlike the more cerebral, high-concept manifestation of the puzzle film, Certified Copy is less about any abstract jigsaw than about the more fascinating puzzle of human behavior as it exists in finite space and time, eschewing the notion of overarching philosophy for something deeper, more mysterious, and ultimately extremely moving. No matter how you look at it you wind up with a Pandora's Box of emotional and thought-provoking consequences.

If the couple is not a married couple then the film is about exploring the shared lives people can create without knowing each other, how their simulation of a marriage is a direct approach to an aesthetic argument of simulation and replication in art. If the couple is married, then the film is about a long-married couple attempting to recapture the springtime of their marriage both by simulating their honeymoon and by replicating themselves as they were fifteen years ago, creating copies of past lives that no longer correspond to their current selves. Or perhaps the time frames are shifting, the question of whether they are married or not can't even begin to be answered, and the couple transforms by some mysterious pirouette from new acquaintances into a married couple. But if this is the case, of course, then the continuity of their day-long dialogue becomes a surprisingly streamlined thread between two disparate time frames, so that the film is at once continuous and discontinuous. Even if you wish to forgo any such interpretation, you are still left with many hallmarks of Kiarostami's Iranian cinema (a restrictive camera that refuses to show us essential information lying outside the frame, pairing of professional and non-professional performers, various methods of implicating the audience in the narrative, etc.) and countless other points of entry (such as recurring visual motifs, the emotional rawness of the performances, references and allusions to the European art film of the past, etc.).

But what primarily matters is the feeling of existing with these people in a bounded temporality, replete with ravishing visual textures and moments of pure cinematic beauty. Kiarostami not only exercises his uncanny ability to depict the changes in visual atmosphere that transpire over the course of a day, but he also synchronizes these changes to the characters' constantly shifting emotional climate. Most of the intellectual ideas of the film, as I have so rudimentarily outlined them above, take form later, after mulling the film over in your mind (believe me, I have far from exhausted all options or meanings; in fact, the more I think about the film, the more convinced I am that the possibilities are endless), but its human and emotional truths unfold moment to moment within the film itself, and once it is over it is almost impossible to recapture them.

In other words, I believe Certified Copy has surmounted Playtime as my favorite film.

Exploring Cassavetes: SHADOWS

2011-03-25T15:04:00.007-04:00

When I first watched John Cassavetes' Shadows about a year ago, I rightfully wrote that it was spontaneous, ahead-of-its-time, awkward, and unpolished. However, I also wrongfully compared it to Altman, Allen, and Scorsese, none of whom even begin to match what Cassavetes is doing in his debut film. Like in Altman films, the dialogue overlaps, but unlike in Altman films, the overlap is not calculated as being part of a style or aesthetic, and it serves a function of directing your attention to multiple things at once (think the dance hall scene early on in the film). Altman still maps his scenes with clear focal points, the surrounding noise intended to locate his main attractions in 'true-to-life' situations. I compared Cassavetes' Manhattan to Allen's, again a gross miscalculation. Allen's New York is cultured and upscale, populated by neurotic intellectuals with easily pinpointed psychological issues. There is no place in Allen's filmography for grime or poverty or ramshackle apartments. Shadows depicts a more subterranean New York, one of bad nightclubs and damp courtyards and overcrowded streets. Scorsese may offer the best point of comparison, if only because Cassavetes exerts a more clear influence on him than the other two, and yet Scorsese's vulgar naturalism serves a far more holistic and deterministic function than Cassavetes', which is always employed as a means of penetrating his unclassifiable and unpredictable characters.

On viewing Shadows a second time I realized that I cared far less about its aesthetic merits than I did the first time: the telephoto street views, the jazz solos, and overall 'look' of the film meant far less to me than did the strength of the performances. When before I admired the film for being open-ended, now I realize that there is no real narrative that makes such a clarification necessary. The entire film is loose, freeform, devoid of linearity or purpose, and all that exists is undefined and undefinable characters undergoing crises of self that are beyond heartbreaking. When before I felt compelled to judge Tony for his racism, which causes him to reject Lelia and propels her into emotional hardness, I now found myself feeling his confusion, disillusionment and awkwardness in the face of what is undoubtedly a striking revelation, that Lelia is, in spite of her appearance, not white. I viewed him as another character in the ensemble rather than as an intruder or negative supporting player. Likewise, I found more to understand in the rest of the characters and their complicated performances. Overall, I felt an accumulation of raw experience that excited and stimulated me, and the prior conception I had of it as a loose, jazzy, independent experiment fell apart entirely. A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie have taught me that forming conceptions of Cassavetes films is fruitless work.

Supplementing my viewing were the first sections of Ray Carney's book-length study of Cassavetes' films. Carney's devotion to Cassavetes is so passionate and exclusive that he finds himself unable to care for the rest of American cinema, which he consigns to an unwavering style that emphasizes fixed characters and transparent 'deep meanings.' Whereas most Hollywood films tell the audience what to think and how to feel, set tones and moods and emotional cues, and strive for legibility at all costs, Cassavetes' films are about shifting surfaces and frenetic behavior, plotlessness and unpredictability. This dichotomy between two schools of cinema is unfortunately and self-evidently simplistic. Carney refers to Welles and Hitchcock over and over again. He claims this is because their films are the most viewed examples that illustrate his argument, but this leads to further difficulties. First, the reader gets the impression that Carney's understanding of Hollywood cinema is confined to a mere handful of canonized classics and well-publicized names. Carney is at pains to tell us that all of Hollywood operates on certain precepts, but fails to go outside his few meager examples. Even more grating is his insistence that both Welles and Hitchcock subscribe to this directorial philosophy, when he only seems to focus on Citizen Kane and Hitchcock's 50s period. Given that Welles's style changed drastically after traveling to Europe, Carney appears to be committing the cardinal sin of consigning the director to his most overpraised masterwork.

Thankfully, this polemic ends when he begins to write about Shadows, but while he has many important things to say about the film, he ends up returning to the same endless contrasts. Carney perpetually finds it necessary to prop up the rest of 'Hollywood cinema' as a negative image to illuminate Cassavetes' genius, and these comparisons prove tiresome. Even more repetitious is his inexhaustible arsenal of metaphors and explanations that emphasize the chasm between the self and its external representation, the clumsiness of his characters as they attempt to perform and express themselves, the ongoing process of revision and improvisation as the characters adjust and readjust to new events and surroundings, and various other iterations of what is essentially the same thing: the characters in Shadows have no fixed identity and are always changing. There comes a point where the reader wishes that Carney would write more about the specifics of the film, as opposed to Cassavetes' overarching philosophy and how this philosophy is so breathtaking and unique.

This is not to say that Carney does not provide many valuable insights. He is perhaps too attached to Cassavetes for these insights not to come across as veiled adulations, but his knowledge of Cassavetes is certainly comprehensive and incontestable. I am hoping that his analysis of Faces, a film he seems to regard even more highly than Shadows, fares better.

Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Rosenbaum)

2011-03-22T01:25:00.009-04:00

As the film critic whose work is most readily accessible to me, thanks to the work he has put into making most of his writings available online, Jonathan Rosenbaum has become a remarkable influence on the way I view cinema. Part of his achievement, and part of what makes him so appealing to me, is in his aim of disentangling film as an art form from film as an industry. As but one of many examples of this polemic that shaped the way I look at film criticism, many of the attitudes that I had once unconsciously formed on the matter of canonicity in cinema, a subject broached in the other book of his I have read, Essential Cinema, were instantaneously debunked upon reading his searing indictment of the American Film Institute's Top 100 Greatest Films list in conjunction with his lengthy and thoughtful reevaluations of many so-called classics that had piqued my curiosity. This skeptical and politically conscious attitude made Ebert's Great Movie essays, pieces that often equate 'greatness' with fame and influence as opposed to thoughtfulness and aesthetics and that were once my model of ideal film writing, all but obsolete.

Of course Rosenbaum's effect on me has been far greater than merely shattering my simplistic perceptions of institutionally fostered concepts of 'greatness' and classicality. In addition to guiding my tastes toward relatively unknown directors, both domestic and abroad, and instilling within me a skeptical predisposition toward the powers that be (whether obvious emblems of corruption such as Hollywood big whigs or less obvious targets such as myth-making biographers and unknowledgeable academics), Rosenbaum has served as a wellspring of all kinds of artistic discourse in addition to a guidepost to other brilliant critics and specialized texts. His often heated and occasionally acerbic writing is offset by his honesty, his lack of conformity and his willingness to share personal and autobiographical information in order to situate his arguments subjectively and place himself on speaking terms, as it were, with the reader. Placing Movies, in covering a larger span of his career and in providing five separate introductory pieces to the different sections of his book, contains more confessions, offhand references to personal struggles, and first-hand accounts of correspondence with critics, directors and other professionals than do the cumulative pieces I have read selectively from his website and the total output of Essential Cinema.

Almost all possible objections are directed toward his selection and categorization of pieces under separate headings, which are structured in a way that turns his introductory pieces into a sequential narrative thread. Because most of the book is a provocation in itself and very little of the writing avoids being combative in some way, a section entitled 'Provocations' seems redundant, and some pieces could have easily been swapped. For instance, a piece on Welles's Othello included in 'Touchstones' is lacking in the way of critical analysis on the film itself and is instead a highly informative investigation into the film's recent restoration. Perhaps, then, the piece could have functioned better as a 'Provocation' (especially considering that it begins with a blunt attack on the tendency of Corporate America to exploit the deceased Welles for its own ends) than as a 'Touchstone.' Some of the denser essays have the quality of over-analysis, and when two or more are placed consecutively with no shorter reviews to act as buffer, one gets bogged down and starts to notice how frequently Rosenbaum repeats certain terminology and lines of argument.

However, these criticisms are minor when viewed in conjunction with the sheer breadth of critical discourse provided. Whereas Essential Cinema is mostly Chicago Reader columns, Placing Movies includes work from all across the span of Rosenbaum's career, not all of it aimed at evaluating films exclusively. Rosenbaum includes much of his writing on other critics, from Manny Farber to Roland Barthes, and one searing piece towards the end of the book takes on an entire disposition of political complacency that Rosenbaum argues has dominated in our view of the history of the cinema, and the Blacklist era in Hollywood in particular. Some of his reviews are expedient and trenchant, for example his Soho News piece on Raiders of the Lost Ark that packs in a plenitude of references, analogies and anecdotes in the brief space it occupies, and others are immense undertakings that take a more serious and research-oriented approach toward their subjects, such as the immense article on Raoul Ruiz that seeks incredibly to synopsize his prolific oeuvre and predominant directorial philosophy, even as Rosenbaum finds himself without access to much of his work. Some Reader pieces I had read before, for instance the analyses of Mélo and The Manchurian Candidate, grew considerably for me, and I believe that the former now most certainly warrants a re-watch.

My favorite piece by far is 'The Death of Hulot,' one of the most personally affecting of the collection that is mostly a lovely account of Rosenbaum's acquaintanceship with Jacques Tati during the early 70s. This intimate portrait is not merely a series of fond recollections; it is also a tragic narrative that helps us find where Tati's life and art intersect, and how his style of direction was in many ways an extension of his everyday persona. In this piece, Rosenbaum offers a kind of critical writing that is formulated not by research or by scrutiny, but by fleeting experience, and as such it appeared to me the most valuable and touching of the many pieces offered here. And yet, due to the prevalence of bias, subjectivity, and autobiography that plays a role in every one of these pieces, the entire book contains this sense of passion and emotion to some extent, and as such it has become an irreplaceable part of my collection.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES | Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 2010

2011-03-20T01:23:00.006-04:00

MACBETH, Take Two (Polanski)

2011-03-03T23:28:00.006-05:00

Polanski's 1971 Macbeth is an entirely different beast than Welles's, directed with far less vigor but composed and interpreted with far more care. Polanski's alterations to the original text are preferable to Welles's simplistic reductions, and the pageantry accommodated by the budget is truly splendorous compared to Welles's slipshod reused sets. However, as a work of cinema, Polanski's film is vastly inferior. He encases all the action in detached wide-screen compositions and parcels half the dialogue into atonal voice-over. The on-location shooting slides into set-bound play-acting, and the only instances of intensity are to be found in the violent passages, which Polanski milks for all the gore he can credibly drain from his brutalized corpses. It is a 'Polanski film' in that it is as soporifically grim and pessimistic as only he can make it. It is a fine work, but it falls far short of Welles's cinematic aggression.

MACBETH, Take One (Welles)

2011-02-26T15:41:00.006-05:00

Consensus seems unduly weighted toward the demeaning notion that Welles's 1948 Macbeth is but an amateurish experiment of little worth except to film schools. Watching it, I understood instantaneously why Godard and Rivette spent eight hours on a single day watching repeated screenings. It is the grandest synthesis of theater and cinema I have yet laid eyes on. The sequence in which Macbeth, plotting with his malevolent lady, mulls over his predestined murder of the king, shot from a fiercely low angle that is transfixed on the king's cavernous quarters engraved in the side of a craggy, gothic spire even as the silhouetted performers occupy two-thirds of the frame, single-handedly renders Bazin's analysis of the staircase murder in The Little Foxes obsolete. It is theater at its most grand and artificial, even as the filmic space transforms the hovering themes of guilt and psychological oppression into indelible images, the cavern of the king standing for a forbidden place in Macbeth's mind where he dares not go, a moral threshold to ascend and from which he can never return. The whole film is drenched in such soundstage imagery of gargantuan thematic proportions, and the chiaroscuro lighting that is Welles's trademark forms the textures, obfuscations, and oppositions that are at the heart of Shakespeare's play and this masterful interpretation of it. It is ripe for theoretical deconstruction even as it is infinitely more visceral and intense than Olivier in his tepidity could ever hope to aspire.

Double Feature (Cukor and De Palma)

2011-02-24T22:16:00.009-05:00

Most of the fun of Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1935) film lies in Cukor's theatrical acuity, his reliance on simple mid-level compositions and compressed space in total service to the performances and how he very quietly swivels his camera around his actors for maximum performative impact. Sylvia Scarlett is a bumpy ride in that it moves briskly and changes gears from scene to scene, Katharine Hepburn and her gender-bending heroine the focal point that draws the rest of the film's disparate elements into some kind of cohesion. It's an enjoyable 30s road movie, but because the film's apparently subversive elements were unable to win me over to the side of its most outspoken admirers, that's about all it remains to me.

I preferred Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974), a histrionic amalgamation of seminal metaphysical texts into a rock-'n-roll horror show. De Palma is like a trashy, tacky Godard, freely taking whatever he wants from the pantheon of pop culture to create something so energetic and visually ferocious that it hardly matters if it's amateurish, formless, or, in the long run, dispensable. Peering through its impenetrable outer shell of glossy wide-angle shots, split-screens, and frivolous scenery, one can still latch onto its classicist underpinnings and absorb the agony and the anguish of its Faustian protagonist, even as the absurdity flowers into infectious camp. It's just a lot of fun.

My Return to Blogging

2011-02-23T21:34:00.010-05:00

I have returned from a long sojourn, during which I came to feel that regularly blogging, in addition to being fatiguing, was not worth my efforts. Capsule reviews can be catalogued on various forums and i am too nervous to publicize this site outside of its meager readership.

But alas, I find myself more immersed in cinema now than ever, consuming books, journals and films themselves at an alarming rate. I need a hermitage wherein I might calmly reflect on my recent thoughts and exploits without the frenzy of a message board. As such, this blog remains a diary, a journal, a day-by-day chronicle of what is on my mind, as I continue to sail the seas and weather the winds of cinephilia.

For today, I produce a small sampling of short film reviews I have penned over the last few months, many of which I take some pride in. Enjoy.

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

A worthy companion to Two-Lane Blacktop as an early-70s zeitgeist masterpiece of the existential anguish of fundamentally empty characters, here coping with Antonioni's favorite theme of modern malaise and the yearning for escape. As in Antonioni's The Passenger, the protagonist leaves his life behind to embark on a reckless odyssey that conjoins him with a similarly undefined woman. Their time together converges on a beautifully fragmented and disorienting scene of landscape lovemaking, as the film itself culminates in an extended reverie of breathtaking, picturesque destruction.

Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)

Duel in the Sun is a film simmering with volatile conflict: the clash between Texan rurality and encroaching industrialization, the heated confrontation between an old-world patriarchal rancher and his New-England-minded son, the heroine's exoticism at odds with Southern femininity and the painful coexistence of her unshakeable lust for a rotten scoundrel and her torturous yearning for civilized married life with his brother. The film is an odd production, Selznick emulating Gone With the Wind for more big-picture success with a lot of matte paintings and horse stampedes, while Vidor as a director seems far more attuned to the stylized intimacy that unfolds in the expressionistically lit interiors. The Technicolor seems all over the place and the acting is always at the same high pitch. If there's anything that keeps the film together it's the sense of romantic and emotional torture that seems to pang all the characters, no matter where they are, and every scene broils with so much passion that Vidor's grandest achievement is in his ability to channel it all into a climax that's more tense and electrified than all the scenes that precede it. The final image of two virtueless lovers drenched in sweat and dust and blood from each other's bullets is the ultimate hauntingly romantic capstone to one of the most unusual but breathtaking Westerns i've ever seen.

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1940)

Capitalist competition gone haywire, miscellaneous Joes scattered around New York staring to the brightly lit Maxwell Coffee building as a heavenly monument to the wealth and success they all crave, every one of them having entered in a $25,000 slogan contest for the coffee conglomerate. It's a satirical conceit made depressing when considering Jimmy MacDonald has been submitting similar slogans in various contests for years, all in the hope that this will get him, his fiance and his mother, all barely scraping by in a dilapidated boarding house, somewhere just a little more comfortable. The misunderstandings that ensue when some mean-spirited co-workers forge a telegram informing Jimmy that he has won spark a farcical snowball of events full of the most trenchant digs at frivolous consumerism, corporate hierarchies, and commercial selectivity i've seen in any film, while the generally despondent but still resiliently optimistic conclusion is heartbreaking. A million times better than The Lady Eve and sure to get me coming back to Sturges in the near-future.

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

Ultra-slick ultra-modern semi-comic existential thriller—full of hard edges, gaudy colors, vertical blinds, and reflective surfaces—about a double-crossed man out to collect $93,000 from his former partner, and by extension the corporation he works for. Part of the beauty is how the ever-stoic Lee Marvin, with his hard, blocky features, blends into the architecture. The frequent flashbacks initially have the feel of rhythmic, jolting sensations, but as Marvin ravages his way through the company's top ranks, they come to thread together his encounters with the executives into inadvertent repetitions and catchphrases, highlighting the absurdity of each one's automatic reluctance to fulfill his simple request even after he has more than proven himself a serious threat. There are tons of doubling effects and thematic symmetries, all of which are complemented perfectly by the labyrinthine, right-angle geometry of Boorman's visual schema.

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

2010-11-04T01:09:00.001-04:00

This is far better than just a 'really good courtroom drama.' This is Preminger handling obscurity of the truth and how our evaluations of what is true and our judgments of other people are wavering, nebulous things subject to impossible-to-define subjective dispositions and emotional circumstance. As in Laura, in which the different characters constructed their own images of the eponymous woman, the different characters in Anatomy of a Murder perform their own visualizations of the night of the murder, an arguably typical murder-mystery trope that ushers forth a multitude of emotional currents. The typical idealistic protagonist vs. smarmy antagonist courtroom game is subverted by the respectability of everyone's motives, the traces of opportunism on the part of the hero, and the lingering final clue that whisperingly suggests that almost all of our opinions, which have been formed through the conventions of the genre, are wrong. During all of the formality of courtroom ceremony, the stake of so many characters, already fully established as complex, ambiguous and mysterious figures, hovers peripherally over the proceedings, so that it is impossible to conceive of this film in the morally crystalized sense of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, which, in confirming all pre-conditioned expectations from the beginning, is basically the complete antithesis to everything that makes this film a masterpiece.

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, 2010)

2010-08-19T17:19:00.001-04:00

A lot of people compare The Ghost Writer to Chinatown in its grasp of paranoia and political corruption, but the most obvious reference point to me seems to be Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps and its subsequent pseudo-remakes. An unsuspecting nobody with a smidgeon of wit takes on a job that gets him in over his head as he stumbles into an enormous political controversy, putting him in immense danger. He is tailed by faceless henchmen, gets to the bottom of a murder mystery, and even has a tense, awkwardly funny meeting with a wickedly condescending and highly suspect intellectual in a manor on a remote estate. As far as story mechanics go, The Ghost Writer is a classical thriller in the best sense of the phrase. And yet it is strictly anti-Hitchcockian in its muted, unobtrusive visuals and methodical pacing. It’s drearily non-picturesque to the point of minimalism, and its absence of a hedged stylization is what sets it radically apart from its oft-noted predecessors. Politically current while still entirely old-fashioned, The Ghost Writer manages goofy fun in the name of genre, seriousness in the name of tone and content, and maturity in its rejection of the overwrought defeatism that has made Chinatown the ever-enduring hallmark of Polanski’s filmography.

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960)

2010-07-13T19:58:00.004-04:00

Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom furnishes a psychologically torturous explanation for its protagonist’s murderous impulses and on first glance the film is easily comparable to Psycho for charting new territory in the realm of psychological horror. But the footage that Powell places upfront of Mark as a child in the throngs of his father’s cruel experiments is only one part of a puzzle that has more to do with artistry than with trauma. Peeping Tom is about the mania of directing a film, and Powell begins his exploration of the medium’s underlying terror by putting us in the subjective position of our hero, who later talks of going on to be a director and who is reprimanded at his part-time job as a lurid photographer of women for making his pictures too artistic. This disconcerting opening, wherein the man holding the camera systematically murders a prostitute, makes clear the directed nature of the footage and consequently ignites all manner of thoughts concerning the act of viewing a film. But while we are called upon to ponder our own viewing habits, we are beckoned with greater urgency to understand the artist’s, and when we finally get a glimpse of the mysterious filmmaker, our first impression is of a withdrawn individual disinclined to interact with others.

What emerges is a portrait of a man who only intervenes in life when behind the comfort of his camera, whose tripod leg constitutes a clear phallic symbol and without which Mark feels emasculated. It is a direct meditation on the concept of director as both passive observer and active manipulator, while working in various meditations on sex, murder and the cinematic voyeurism that infuses them. We may at first feel in the security of Powell’s assumedly ‘objective’ camera when removed from the vantage point of Mark’s, but as the film progresses it is Mark instead of Powell who emerges as the film’s director; he more or less states that he has willed the events leading up to his own demise as he obsessively films everything he can. Powell bravely identifies with this tortured individual, whose series of grisly murders is, in his mind, the building blocks of a grand work of art that can only achieve fruition in his death. It is one of the great films about artists, and in the running parallels between a large film crew working on an up-and-coming hit and Mark’s own directorial ventures we see in the latter a personal intimacy and nurturing instinct absent in the former (auteur theory encapsulated). Mark’s murder of one of the film’s extras places a morbid irony on the idea of directing actors, and this crops up later when the studio film’s leading actress's reaction to the corpse (placed by Mark in one of the prop suitcases) invariably becomes an extension of her own performance within the film she’s making.

These dissolves of the line between art and reality as they apply to the voyeurism at the heart of the film medium are manifold, even among the notions the film raises about fear and sexuality and childhood trauma. Amidst this swarm of challenging ideas, what lingers longest is the horrific image of a demented perfectionist of an artist leaving corpse after corpse behind until he achieves the right result, which is almost as terrifying as the fact that we can’t help but sympathize with him.

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

2010-07-13T15:19:00.003-04:00

When it comes to chronicling the ephemeral, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise falls somewhere in between the spiritual heights of the transcendental school of cinema and stark, neo-realistic accounts of the mundane. Leaning towards romantic precepts of destiny but never moving beyond the everyday frankness of conversation, Before Sunrise is more affecting than many of its imitators, many of them great, even as it comes close to outdoing its most obvious predecessors, Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock and Leo McCarey’s Love Affair, by depicting the love between its protagonists as evanescent rather than something to be instantly recognized and carved in stone forever. As in the aforementioned films (and the third act of McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow), Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s daylong sojourn in Vienna is a catalogue of kind strangers and evocative places and uneasy wistfulness, and these beautiful elements in harmony with the character-enriching dialogue transform the film from a self-contained romance into a breathtaking ode to love in transit.

White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982)

2010-06-30T03:02:00.007-04:00

White Dog marks my third Fuller film because of my impulsive desire to see why there seems to be such a divide between the generally negative reaction to it I’ve observed among acquaintances and the overwhelmingly positive appraisals of it by several critics I greatly respect. It is noted in a DVD supplement that Paramount higher-ups objected to Fuller’s nakedly intense style: energetic tracking shots, crosscutting between extreme close-ups, and several low angles (not to mention how Fuller incorporates contemporary slow motion into his typically explosive style). I can only imagine, had the film been properly released, how much of a stir his technique would have caused in a period in Hollywood cinema I generally regard as tepid and conservative, descriptives that can also be applied to the country's political climate (Fuller himself remarked that Reagan and the Republicans had American morality by the balls, and the film’s censorship is one of the most egregious examples of pressure group intervention).

White Dog to some seems like a no-brainer anti-racist film, a view no doubt enforced by Fuller’s blunt dialogue and metaphors, but I found it absolutely brutal. Comparing Fuller’s treatments of racism in both this film and The Steel Helmet, the latter attacks it on both a national and distantly personal level while the former concentrates its critique into something more primal and readily identifiable. The corruption of what we never fail to understand is an innocent and pitiable creature, or, more abstractly, nature as a whole, is possibly the most incisive dramatization of the ills of forcefully embedded racism because it so aptly and simply cuts through any apologetic nonsense about racism being a natural phenomenon. Whatever the common criticisms are against the film’s datedness, overacting or exploitation stylistics, Fuller’s uncanny skill at splicing together a streamlined performance for the titular German Shepherd so that we comprehend in its visage a reflection of humanity’s vices undeniably compensates for, and greatly transcends, these petty grievances.

Out of the Blue (Dennis Hopper, 1980)

2010-06-12T00:49:00.005-04:00

I don’t know all that much about punk, but I’ll be damned if there’s a better movie about it than Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, a harrowing film about a rebellious youth named Cebe (Linda Manz) whose alcoholic father (Hopper) is soon to be released from prison after a traffic collision that killed several children and whose misguided optimism for familial security withers and dies with his destructive behavior and the resurgence of repressed memories of abuse she suffered as a child. She recoils into herself as the film careens forward, not unlike the semi we see crashing into the school bus at the film's start, erupting in a blazing ball of nihilistic self-destruction. The grungy locations and use of non-actors imbue the film with a flashbulb cultural and historical relevance and Manz is such an affective performer that even the most conventional scenes—a counselor played by Raymond Burr lecturing Cebe on her delinquent behavior—are worth crying over. The film is so brutal that any proposed solution looks like childish didacticism in comparison to the real-life horrors of Cebe’s walled-in life and the final, fatalistic stab at punk poeticism achieves an elegiac inevitability that manages to transcend both manufactured defeatism and logical nonsensicality in how sadly perfect it is.

The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

2010-06-02T18:49:00.008-04:00

In The Lusty Men, Nicholas Ray anticipates the concise metaphor of the chicken run in Rebel Without a Cause with an entire two hours worth of suspense over a character’s choice to either jump early or ride to the death. It’s the fatalistic masculine ritual of the rodeo, and Ray explores it from several angles—thrill-seeking as metaphysical rush, danger-seeking as a quick route to fame and profit, and glory-seeking as male self-absorption. Robert Mitchum plays Jeff McCloud, a washed up rodeo star who partners up with Wes Merritt, played by Arthur Kennedy, a ranch-hand eager to make it big as a rodeo star himself. Susan Hayward plays his wife, Louise, in one of the most touching, understated female performances I’ve ever seen. Just about the only clearly thinking character the whole way through, Louise embodies Ray’s feminist leanings in her sympathetic foiling against the absurdity of macho ritualism. Ray never misses an opportunity to expose Wes for his misogynistic hypocrisy, lashing out at Jeff for mooching off his winnings while failing to acknowledge his own thankless dependence on his wife’s assumed domesticity and pleasuring himself with nightclub women without a blow to his conscience before hostilely confronting Jeff for kissing his wife.

If Wes is a brutish fame-seeker who becomes delusional about his rodeo skills and gambles away his winnings, then Jeff is harder to pin down, a wistful, tired-out man who exemplifies the lightly glimmering romance of the rodeo-circuit with all his failures behind him and who, like Dixon Steele and Jim Stark, desires some sort of family. He is seen at the beginning trekking in long shot through a rodeo graveyard and soon after goes to his childhood home in search of old belongings. It is one of my favorite Mitchum performances, confident and fragile and plaintive, and the ways Ray uses his depth of space to place him in various approximations to the other characters—triangularly in the context of Wes and Louise’s marriage and diametrically with Wes, his relationship to either ever in flux—gives the film an enrapturing formalism. The broader, poetic undertones erupt full-force when Jeff’s hard, masking exterior is shed to reveal his selfless, romantic motives and he rides off to a grand finish in a final spurt of his former glory—a heroic sacrifice, a tragic ode to what could have been between him and Louise, and a grand assertion of immortality.

“There never was a bronc that couldn't be rode, there never a cowboy that couldn't be throwed. Guys like me last forever.”

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

2010-05-21T21:02:00.003-04:00

Douglas Sirk is heralded as one of the slyest socially critical American directors of the fifties, though to be perfectly honest I find his targets in All That Heaven Allows to be obvious, easily compartmentalized concepts that feel only superficially representative of actual societal maladies. Rock Hudson's Ron Kirby stands as the handsome, earthy antithesis to materialism, in tune with nature and rock solid in his refusal to conform to society; his untainted ideology and handsome looks makes him some masculine ideal, less a character and more an archetypal savior. Jane Wyman stars as the disillusioned woman who falls in love with Kirby and who desires to break free from her social and domestic confinement but can’t quite summon the strength. Sirk launches attacks on class snobbishness and television sets and social prejudices with little subtlety or nuance (the daughter, espousing pop psychology and precociously toying with her glasses, is a blunt fifties construct that seems to trumpet to the viewer how socially relevant the film is). The structure of his love story, which reminded me of McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (possessing a remarkably similar ending), seems mechanical in its efforts to ensure a social statement at the expense of romantic passion. That said, Sirk works wonders with his visuals, telling his story in a static, Wyler-esque fashion that excels with framing devices and spatial expanses, but with an added flair for color, shifting between autumnal and wintry hues and using them to adeptly capture small-town America. Sirk seems to make his social criticisms as much through his color scheme as through his narrative, assigning cold greens to the club parties and textured reds and oranges to Kirby’s newly furnished mill. Nighttime juxtapositions between bright fluorescent orange and luminous blue moonlight achieve a romance almost over-suited to the story.

Obsession (Brian De Palma, 1976)

2010-05-13T16:51:00.004-04:00

Obsession is Brian De Palma’s tribute to Vertigo, possessing less of the cosmic delirium of its source but having its own distinct eeriness. The first half hour is a mishmash of many Hitchcockian elements, many of which are from other films, but this tributary pastiche only serves as a launch pad for a story with as many haunting symmetries and parallels as its predecessor. A striking scene: Sandra’s transfixion on the painting of Elizabeth seems to mirror Judy’s transfixion of the museum painting of her ‘past’ self before we learn that she is really gazing at her dead mother. All throughout the film De Palma conflates the assumptions we make about this film as a Hitchcock rip-off with the gradual emergence of its own exclusive themes so that Freudian maternal longing becomes interfused with a more ghostly obsession, and that's but one example. The ending to Vertigo might be the most ambiguous conclusion to any of Hitchcock’s films, ironic because the last shot of Obsession depicts a conventional embrace set to Herrman’s score at its most romantic, implicitly revealing that all of the deceit has bubbled to the surface—Michael now knows all that has transpired and is finally reunited with his daughter—and making it a Hollywood capper if there ever was one, before it spirals into a carousel of psychological terror, the themes of incest, childhood trauma, and obsession now more apparent than ever. The freeze-framed ‘The End’ is gnawingly perverse.

Mélo (Alain Resnais, 1986)

2010-04-21T01:06:00.005-04:00

Many canonized directors often wind up endlessly lauded for a single work, and for Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad is that film. I had heard about it numerous times before ever once hearing about a single post-sixties film of his, or even his 1963 Muriel, made only two years afterwards. I suppose like many people, I started with Marienbad, deemed it the first experimental film I had ever seen that I simply could not get into, and then soon after billed Resnais as a pretentious French intellectual. The past few months have brought me up to speed on Resnais. I watched Muriel and found a painful, relevant, and all too real story, the shattered chronology a profound reflection of the characters’ shattered emotions and overall disillusionment. I then read up a bit about Resnais and among other things learned that he loves comic books, and came to a perception of him radically different from that I had formed after my novice viewing of Marienbad. A few weeks ago I revisited Marienbad and was completely absorbed; watching films on a laptop is not always an immersive experience, but I never once removed my eyes from the screen during the film’s entirely, viewing it as a hypnotic fairytale rather than a puzzle to be solved.

Today I watched Mélo, a film so far off from avant-garde snobbery I would imagine people whose only familiarity with Resnais is Marienbad would be genuinely shocked at its melodramatic restraint. The film consists of five or six lengthy scenes with a few interludes in between, a red curtain showing up three times to mark the end of each act. Associating Resnais primarily with montage, it is something of a surprise that Mélo is comprised of lengthy takes filmed with an inquisitive and at times interrogative camera. His mise-en-scéne reflects the 1920s in its cubist, but otherwise non-showy, set design, and to emulate the feeling of a theatrical production, he unnaturally dims and brightens his lights during shots to heighten the drama. The story is too conventional for anyone to take notice, a love affair leading to a suicide culminating in a confrontation between the widower and his wife’s lover, both of whom happen to be best friends. Reading what Bazin says of Renoir’s The River, he discusses how the film’s content is conventional to the extent that a novel (either its source material or yet another adaptation) would be subpar; the reason the film is a masterpiece is that Renoir goes beyond the conventionality of his dramatic conflict to craft a film more concerned with visual relationships and analogies and thematic conveyances of the eternal cycle of life.

Mélo, a film I believe to be greatly superior to The River, is a film based on a Henry Bernstein play I can’t imagine is much better than the Rumer Godden’s novel that formed the basis of The River. And yet instead of trying to transcend his source material by arriving at some kind of insight about life or painting over it with lush visuals or removing the necessity for linear plot, Resnais stays true and adheres so firmly to melodrama, the term in which the film’s title originates, that his film becomes a beautiful and more importantly unpretentious telling of a sort of typical story. Resnais directs his actors so carefully and shoots their scenes together so intimately, that the result is endlessly touching. Mélo is perhaps the zenith of what one might call an un-cinematic stage play, and yet, paraphrasing what Bazin said of Wyler’s The Little Foxes, it registers precisely as cinematic by nature of its restraint and asceticism and lack of formal exertion. This is a great film.

Juliet of the Spirits (Federico Felilni, 1965)

2010-04-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

If Fellini doused the story of 8 ½ with elements of the surreal then when it comes to Juliet of the Spirits, he submerges the film entirely in bizarre dreams and hallucinations and doesn’t let it come up for breath. What results is a cartoon under the guise of a prestigious art film. The genius of 8 ½ is that the subjective visions and flashbacks are on one level psychodrama and on another parodies of psychodrama, critiquing Guido as he tries to compartmentalize his life based on clichés of Catholic guilt and male fantasy. Juliet of the Spirits relies on the shopworn Fellini images and scenarios invoking similar themes—a school stage production of a martyr burned at the stake, a licentious father flying away with his young mistress and an exotic otherworldly sex party—but emboldens them until they become garish symbols and bases for the heroine’s day-to-day behavior and pseudo-meaningful Freudian determinants. Of course the film is so silly that it’s impossible to really put stock in any of them; the ending retraces 8 ½’s steps by accumulating all the arbitrary mysticism into one big hellish mass that Juliet must rise above or surrender to, except in this case there is no real thrust or structure or suspense. That there is no delineation between reality and mysticism and that it is all just a hodgepodge of overtly psychological projections relating to Fellini’s own marriage to Giulietta Masina may make it a work of genius to some, but I found it a self-indulgent bore, a vacuous showcase for Fellini’s brand of cinema without anything to latch onto. It is some of the best mise-en-scéne I’ve ever seen, and Fellini never fails as a ringleader of his imaginative ghostly carnival, but I honestly don’t think it amounts to much more than unrestrained excess.

The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)

2010-04-16T12:36:00.003-04:00

I find myself with such dashed hopes watching Jean Renoir’s The River, a beautiful Technicolor film brimming with gorgeous soft hues and a cyclical feeling of interminable drift. What let me down was that the Indian culture must be seen from the outside by a British colonial family, very few of the Indians counting as actual characters. I suppose I must account for a double standard given my love for Black Narcissus and its clear Orientalism, but I find a difference between a studio production striving for loony, delirious cartoon horror than an on-location shoot designed to make the viewer a part of Indian culture. Except for Melanie, who herself is half-white, none of the Indians count for more than props, and except for the lovely shots of the river or of the bazaar or of Indian daily ritual, the majority of the film is upper-class British melodrama, India almost used as a backdrop. Though it is a stunning film, I felt as if in fully embracing his Impressionistic eye for color, Renoir was betraying his more impulsive shooting style. It’s closer to Powell and Pressburger filming Meet Me In St. Louis in India than it is to a close observance of an enlightening culture.

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

2010-04-11T01:37:00.002-04:00

Anyone who doesn’t get anything out of The Wind Will Carry Us isn’t trying hard enough. Kiarostami evokes the frustration inherent to Bresson in his insistence on keeping things off camera and relying on a realistic, almost ritualistic observance of life interspersed with fleeting moments of transcendence. The Wind Will Carry Us may even be more challenging than a typical Bresson film in how adamantly it insists on denying us crucial characters and even the story’s central emotional pivot, the one-hundred year-old woman who is expected to die. We are even denied any scene at nighttime, at least until the end, to lull us into the idle stasis of the central character, a telecommunications engineer from Tehran who has traveled to a mountainside Kurdish village seeking to film the mourning ritual following the woman’s death.

In being refused a look at the elderly woman, we almost become implicated in Bahzed’s and his film crew’s opportunistic attitude towards her approaching death. Kiarostmi almost insists that we view her unscrupulously as an abstraction, a number, a symbol, without offering any of the usual pathos. So we have to take initiative and search elsewhere, as in canvas-like shots of landscapes set to the words of a doctor’s on the wonders of life and nature, or in the distantly audible tears of the woman’s family signaling her passing, or in any number of transient moments of beauty and poetry scattered throughout. The many subtle instances in which Kiarostami makes us and his protagonist morally and emotionally invested in the death of this woman expound until the ending. After we have been stuck in two-weeks of sunny midday for the entire film, the moment Bahzed has been waiting for finally arrives and in the breathtaking glory of the early morning and the tragedy that has befallen all he can muster is a few pitiful snapshots.

As someone whose grandfather may not have long to live and who has been struggling with the inevitability of death, with the stereotyping of the elderly, and especially with the reverence and emotional response I feel I am obligated to have, there is something so unexpectedly, almost unattainably life-affirming in the Mrs. Malek’s grandson’s response to Bahzed’s questions about her, a casual “I hope she gets better.” Bahzed is taken aback by his simple and natural hopefulness, and all throughout the film he is coming to terms with these same questions and issues in regard to death, life and old age (he himself is missing a family funeral for the opportunity), as well as the morality and ethics of how he is coming to terms with them, but we never know exactly what he is feeling and he remains almost wholly ambiguous all throughout the film. Only the final gesture gives us a hint of where he stands by the film’s conclusion, one that results in an indescribable moment of cathartic poetry.

Of course the film is about so much more than this. It is about media and communication. One of the villagers tells Bahzed that the village is ideal for communication, which is visually connoted by its multiple pathways and zigzag layout. Though he works in the field of telecommunications, he humorously finds himself having to drive to a mountaintop to answer his phone, often finds himself making many verbal fumbles to various villagers, and even conceals his reason for his journey. The telephone wires and a man’s digging a hole in preparation for the erection of a radio tower are ever-noticeable details establishing the reaches of the media’s figurative empire. There is a further irony in that Bahzed the media engineer’s idleness in the face of the constant farm work of the young men of the village. That the story, as I have already noted, is almost exclusively told during daytime gives the village women ample screen time. The film ultimately amounts to a series of observations and depictions of antiquity and modernity as they apply to our changing way of life and our perceptions of life itself, both of which are attributable just much to the world as a whole as to Iran.

I feel like The Wind Will Carry Us reveals many of my own shortcomings, and that is due just as much to the emotional reaction I had to it as to the reaction I didn’t have and feel I should have. I will surely be revisiting this in the future.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)

2010-04-07T20:16:00.003-04:00

The Young Girls of Rochefort is the Demy I’m most hungry for, but it’s difficult to believe it’s much better than The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the sublime and experimental French musical about a doomed love between two people. Instead of formulaic alternations between stagy song-and-dance numbers and expository dialogue scenes, Cherbourg blends music with all of the little rituals of life; every word is sung and Michel Legrand’s score never lets up. The opening shot is one of the most soothing opening credits sequences I have yet seen, an almost Tati-esque feat of geometric framing that tilts down from a gorgeous long shot of the city of Cherbourg beyond the harbor to a perfect bird’s eye composition that renders all of the passersby as the tops of umbrellas gliding forward in straight lines or diagonals, crisscrossing each other’s paths or forming processions. This colorful, abstract, painterly shot sets the tone for the over-saturated colors and vivacious Parisian streets. In the same way that this extravagance of mise-en-scéne clashes with the more impressionistic impulse Demy has for gently capturing rain on cobblestone and overcast days, so does the exuberance of the music clash with the profoundly ordinary story the film tells, one rooted in the oft-tragic rhythms of lower middle class life during France’s conflict with Algeria as opposed to something more polished and contrived.

Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

2010-04-07T00:32:00.008-04:00

Comparing Mulholland Dr. to Eraserhead, it would appear that David Lynch is obsessed with throbbing background noise, awkward social tension, out-of-nowhere vignettes that may or may not mean anything, and subjective, psychological horror. Mulholland Dr. ups the ante with a limitless number of around-the-corner point-of-view suspense shots, a bifurcated structure in which one or both parts are dreams, and loads of jigsaw puzzles, recurring objects and images, and a conflicted perspective of Hollywood that is both cynical and nostalgic, lurid and fascinating.

My interpretation (spoilers): the popular interpretation is that the first part of the film is Diane’s (Naomi Watts) hopeful, idealistic dream interspersed with nuggets of the grim reality that emerges in the second part. Jumping off of that, I believe that both parts are equally dreamlike, and the story elements unrelated to Betty’s (Diane’s dream identity) predicament almost completely concern Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), the talented director who becomes broke, learns his wife is having an affair, and whose latest project is overtaken by mobsters. The first part presents a bitter, cynical life that is remedied in the second, wherein he is almost a caricature of a successful celebrity director. I believe this suggests mirror dreams, Camille (or Rita, played by Laura Harring) in each one a doll for either Adam or Diane to shape in his or her ideal image.

If one of the central themes of the film is the frustration of an artist trying to maintain control of his art in the face of the limitations of the Hollywood studio system, then perhaps there is a chronology that runs between the two realities, the first part depicting Adam as a frustrated artist forced to sell out and the second part depicting his wonderfully shallow, superstar life afterwards. From this perspective, Diane would appear to be the talent that got shafted in favor of the studio’s commercial choice, Camille. When the struggling Diane explains that both she and Camille vied for the role and that the latter won the part, she may be recounting events surreally dramatized in the first part, in which Adam’s statement, “that’s the girl,” makes Diane (or in this case Betty) panicky and uneasy, as if she is either recalling the defining event that drove her to failure or actually enduring it as it unfolds in a heightened dreamworld.

What is fascinating to me more than anything is that both parts of the film seem to exist simultaneously, given the plot threads that tie them together with such a compressed temporal proximity and overlap, and at the same time they seem like they could very well be years apart, as if there is some kind of consistent reality that binds them together (the neighbor who wants her dishes back for example) and doesn't compartmentalize either into a fully dream or fully real world. Finally, the stem of so much of my frustration and intrigue has to do with Diane being awaken from being asleep (or dead) only to return to the same pose upon killing herself, as if it is cyclical, and the Cowboy may as well come back to resurrect her (or wake her up) yet again.

The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940)

2010-04-06T18:23:00.001-04:00

In Jean Renoir’s autobiography, there is a chapter on internal and external truth, in which Renoir describes a sailor played by Chaplin, his scenes filmed on a soundstage, as infinitely more real than one played by an experienced and dedicated actor striving for authenticity, his scenes filmed on location in an actual sailboat. The Great Dictator is one of the strongest cases for Renoir’s assessment of ‘realism’ in cinema, and it is also the film that greatest aligns with Renoir’s belief that, during the rise of Hitler, it was a filmmaker’s duty to use his art to combat fascism whatever the cost. Despite the grave nature of the subject matter, the almost awkward pantomime and slapstick in the face of dictatorial oppression and discrimination, the film is never unbelievable. Chaplin plays both a Jewish barber and dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel, and he commits to both roles so completely that the film’s credulity never suffers, and even in the midst of so much silliness, there is something indelibly true about the film. As Chaplin abandons all comedy at the end to speak right to the heart of the screen in a desperate, but in the fictional world of the film successful, plea for liberty and goodness, there is the unmistakable mark of sincerity, of rising to an occasion, and of abandoning all characteristic clumsiness to do what must be done. It is a similar kind of transcendent comedy to City Lights.

Two by Jim Jarmusch: Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai (1999)

2010-04-06T14:20:00.002-04:00

I basically have to defer to Rosenbaum’s reviews of these two Jarmusch masterpieces; he not only delves into each film’s respective strengths, but also describes what makes them kindred spirits of sorts. Dead Man is possibly everything I love about cinema; zero unnecessary plot elements, poetic storytelling, beautifully stark nature photography, and an undercurrent of enigmatic spirituality bubbling beneath the surface of it all, like a Tarkovsky film with a more concrete literary and historical basis. Ghost Dog is a more mainstream effort, but it presents such a grandiose overview of a world full of fascinating multicultural intersections and overlaps. My generally pessimistic friend, upon seeing it, told me that he was excited by its view of America as harboring such radical possibilities for cultural fusion. Binding the two films are the themes of cultural transgressions, extinction, repeating scene transitions serving as unifying punctuation, and poetry as a basis for a character’s actions.

Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)

2010-03-31T01:57:00.002-04:00

I have never seen a David Lynch film before Eraserhead, having always had a premonition that he was of that school of offbeat over-lauded American filmmakers that include the Coen brothers among others. I haven’t ruled it out, but Eraserhead really is too good for me not to take a sudden interest. It’s weird comic-horror tinged with surrealism, taking place in an industrialized small-town dystopia and dependent on amplified social awkwardness and convulsive, guilt-ridden anxiety in the most grotesque, but still eerily familiar, situations. The auditory projections of paranoia and entrapment, always manifest in a soundtrack of perpetual screeching, throbbing and mechanistic sounds, pack the film’s biggest punch, even more so than the gloomy hospital-room look of the interiors, achieved by uncomfortable contrasts between over-bright lighting and cast shadows. All of the episodes and dream sequences build to a horrifying view of puritanical salvation, a unifying theme that elevates the film from the status of incoherent head trip to something far more gripping and personal.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)

2010-03-30T21:34:00.008-04:00

Letter from an Unknown Woman is one of the saddest films I’ve seen out of 1940s Hollywood. My second Ophüls film, I believe that one could devote a lifetime to studying the intricacies of his camera movements; it’s not just that there is a technical genius to the way he situates his camera and builds his dolly tracks so that the movements appear fluid and effortless. There is a profound way the camera becomes personally identified with the characters, not taking a strictly subjective vantage point, but directing itself in such a way that it obeys their thoughts and impulses. A typical long shot of Lisa, the love-stricken heroine, as a child beating rugs in the yard with her friend suddenly becomes a slow tracking shot up to the top of an outdoor stairwell to the next-door apartment of the man she loves, building suspense as she is temporarily blocked out before reaching top. As she reaches a midway point, she is in full view, but then she turns the corner and continues her trek; suddenly the camera is at a low-angle, building an even fiercer suspense than before. There is another simple shot at a candy store, where the camera seems transfixed on the exuberant motions of a toffee maker, before suddenly tracking to the left in coordination with a long wooden oven pan arriving at Lisa, eyeing her spoils with delight.

I like this so much better than The Earrings of Madame de…, which is to some his best film, because that film played along like an extended short story, reliant on baroque symbols and archetypal scenarios, methodically structured and predetermined by coincidences. Letter from an Unknown Woman depends similarly on the conflict between a woman’s love and the world’s ignorance to that love; she has spent her whole life in love with a famous composer and he only meets her twice, the first time years after she had first fallen in love and the second time not even remembering the first. He is oblivious to his responsibilities to her and she refuses to reveal herself to him; she is left by the end alone and he about to face his demise at the hands of her husband. This sounds like a stock tragic romance, but as a ninety-minute film that rushes headlong through a woman’s entire life, it makes a strong case for the necessary elisions and simplifications intrinsic to such a tale. As she states at the beginning, she cannot remember her life before she first eyed the man she loves, and whenever she sees him the entirety of her life feels compressed, as if not just romantically, but truly perceptually her life is defined by the short time she has spent in his presence. What is so devastating is that he only understands this on hindsight, after a life of ostensible success resulting in bitter failure. The final flashback montage is so perfect, such a concise disclosure of the film’s enchantment with ephemeral joy. Even without this thematic strength, the story is told so elegantly as to make it transcendent.

The film is set in a Vienna so delicately crafted in the studio that it would almost appear to single-handedly justify one of Manny Farber’s problems with The Third Man, that it wasted its on-location shooting with the kind of manipulated, oblique imagery ideal for replication on a soundstage. Letter from an Unknown Woman contrasts the war-ravaged network of criminal racketeering with a dark, dreamy land of cobblestone streets, close-knit complexes, parks and candy stores. It feels just as real and immersive, if not more so, than the Vienna of The Third Man, which to me seems like a sort of abstraction.

La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)

2010-03-29T10:11:00.001-04:00

With the fourth film in Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, I believe that this is possibly the most astounding example of Rohmer’s aesthetically soothing but intellectually stimulating style. It is not as good as My Night at Maud’s, but it is just as complex, detailing a man temporary resigned from life at a summer villa and a subtle mental game he plays with a notoriously easy woman also residing there. The premise seems to be that she wishes to seduce him in order to add him to her ‘collection,’ while his rigid morality and egoism, as well as another woman on leave to London, prevents him from giving in. It’s a careful, airtight progression, marked out bit-by-bit by one of Rohmer’s typical introspective narrations; every spoken word is of the utmost importance in guiding the story along, while the onscreen action seems secondary. The picturesque by-the-beach villa and nearby seaport, rendered in many a glorious, vibrant long shot provides a relaxed visual counterpoint to the busy thoughts and dilemmas the characters undergo.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)

2010-03-25T22:34:00.004-04:00

If The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a fatal flaw, it is the score by Dave Grusin that seems more attuned to a TV police drama than an observant look at the inner workings of the Boston mob. The film is so ordinary that the attempted enhancements of the awfully dated keyboard track collide tragically with the plain, unadorned action to which it is set. Besides that single distraction, The Friends of Eddie Coyle far surpassed my expectations. Roger Ebert’s glowing review cites the bank robberies as unnecessary, because he believes it to be Mitchum’s film. And while Robert Mitchum, with his droopy eyes and turned-down mouth and effortless ability to convey world weary sadness and years of pain, is at his best, the film is truly an ensemble piece, and without the bank heists and the gun exchanges and everything else that doesn’t involve Mitchum, the viewer could never get an overarching view of the Boston mob as a network of various deals and encounters, all of which are marked by an only customary formality and a terrifying paranoia. Kent Jones’ insightful essay describes the film as a showcase for some of the best character actors of the seventies, almost none of whom ever got a better opportunity to shine. What I found so haunting about the film is the starkness of it all; it is not an insistent, manipulated tone of foreboding, but in its frank subject matter and grimy Boston locales there is an extremely tacit sense of fear—the fatal deadlines of a gunrunner’s drop-offs or the deadly misunderstandings implicit in the complicated relationship between mob and police. It is without a doubt an early seventies crime gem, easily in the same range of quality as The Godfather.

One Wonderful Sunday (Akira Kurosawa, 1947)

2010-03-23T19:14:00.003-04:00

With One Wonderful Sunday, I find that I officially prefer Kurosawa’s meditations on postwar Japan to his extravagant samurai epics. Prompted by a recent blog entry by David Bordwell, in which he expresses some skepticism about Kurosawa’s major films and studies with enthusiasm some of his forties output, I decided to sit down and watch this little gem of a movie about a disillusioned veteran Yuzo (Isao Numasaki) spending a Sunday with his fiancé Masako (Chieko Nakakita), both of whom are poor and struggling in postwar Tokyo. The film has a lot of Capra-esque populist sentimentality, but this is given an affecting realist weight by the on-location shooting and narrative lapses into bitter sadness and defeatism. A shattering of the fourth-wall in the film’s final movement is obviously going to strike some viewers as going too far to make a statement or elicit an audience response, but the sheer desperation with which Masako pleads feels like a sincere beckoning to the people of Japan, and is doubtless warranted by the state of the nation during Allied occupation. There is no grand triumph of the people, but there are flittering moments of everyday whimsy and joy; all this, together with wonderful camerawork—dolly shots that slide across the rainy city streets and a slow, low-angle inward tracking shot that builds suspense as he approaches an embittered shopkeeper are two noticeable examples—make One Wonderful Sunday one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and prod me to explore more of his early work.

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

2010-03-23T00:30:00.007-04:00

The look of In the Mood for Love includes out-of-focus splashes of fluorescence, intricate patterns adorning wallpaper and drapery, bright lights in dim rooms that imbue faces with a gleaming amber, and numerous uses of toned down lighting to heighten all manner of saturated colors. And that’s just the mise-en-scène; Wong also loves rapid unpredictable cutting, slow motion, and ping-pong camera movements. This style is more intoxicating in his 1995 film Fallen Angels, my only other exposure to his work, but in In the Mood for Love it drenches the screen with a more formal beauty; at the beginning the subdued colors and translucence creates a mood of plaintive isolation, but this eventually grows into a lovely romantic overlay of a profoundly affecting love story. Because of the melancholy and indecision that remains at the heart of the characters, however, the two modes of feeling coexist, and the result is powerfully bittersweet. Isolation is also a theme of Fallen Angels of course, but that is the loneliness of urban existentialism; this is the sad mourning of two people panged by adultery, who fall in love and together contemplate their lives and their marriages. The ending is a devastating ode to the intangibility yet clarity of memory, a poetic lament to what was and can never be again. Critics, and even Wong himself, seem to have their own interpretations of the couple—do they really refuse each other for moral reasons? is there a buried sense of perversity to their relationship? do they actually consummate their love? and so on and so forth. On a first viewing I prefer not to probe the inevitable wells of emotional ambiguity that clearly lie at the heart of a film defined by a moody stillness and preference for atmosphere over action. I would rather let the indescribable mystery of the film, the delirious, enigmatic aftertaste of the shrouded imagery, the intermittent violin theme, and Wong’s vision of the beautiful, heartrending stasis of love remain undisturbed.

Passing Fancy (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

2010-03-22T02:45:00.003-04:00

Passing Fancy borrows from I Was Born, But… the theme of a son’s shame for his father, but Ozu is straying slightly further from the comedy of his two earlier films. I may still prefer I Was Born, But… for its lackadaisical view of childhood, following a carefree schoolyard narrative before erupting in the momentary pain of the boys’ contempt for their father’s poor social standing. The moments of rebellion are heartbreaking, but there is a whimsical grace to it all, and it doesn’t take long for the father to placate the two boys before they return to the schoolyard yet again, ending in an extended, lyrical long-shot. Passing Fancy is a more intimate film, apparently inspired by King Vidor’s Depression-era film The Champ, comprised of far more low-to-the-ground close-ups and meticulous still-shots; Donald Sosin’s isolated piano score accentuates the careful rhythm of Ozu’s analytical cutting. The result is a more plotted out film about a very lovingly crafted child/father relationship. The jokes are sparser and the atmosphere less quaint and immersive, but the even more fastidious camerawork and attention to details, be they emotionally charged objects or simple hand gestures, makes Passing Fancy a more layered and pungent pathos-driven work, the closest a silent film has come to making me cry after The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971)

2010-03-19T22:05:00.007-04:00

Jacques Tati’s Trafic was released the same year as Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, an existential American road movie of wide stretches of pavement—the three main characters can get where they need to go but they exist in a sort of stasis without having a real destination. Trafic has a more humorously skeptical view of automobiles; Mr. Hulot and his team have an urgent destination, but are thwarted at every turn by border control, car pile-ups, gas shortages breakdowns, and, of course, traffic. Cars are constantly coming close to crashing and traffic signals are always faltering; the blaring sounds of the car radio encroaching on the score and drivers in a perpetual state of boredom. Not nearly as funny as the three previous Hulot films, not surprising given the financial disaster of Playtime four years before, but it has plenty of echoes of Mon Oncle and Playtime especially. Roads, cars and gas stations chop up the countryside, hearkening back to Mon Oncle’s dichotomy between the rustic and the modern. Many visual cues from Playtime are peppered throughout—streetlights, homogenized parking lots, car windows producing the same effect as Paris’s glass doors—and the Amsterdam car show begins as the Paris airport, a vacant delineated space whose silence is only interrupted by a monotone female voice over loudspeakers, before it blossoms into a chaotic swarm of people and objects. The most poetic scene in the film comes toward the end, when instead of rushing to Amsterdam to show off their camper car, Hulot, Maria, Marcel, and the mechanic they have found take advantage of their nifty little vehicle near the bank of a river for a little picnic; for one brief instance they have forgotten the mad racetrack of the highway and their obligations to the automotive company, choosing instead to bask in the quaint stillness of each other’s company. The ending, in its own small way, is as lyrical and vivacious as that of Playtime, and is one of my favorite scenes out of all the Hulot films. Even on a commercial low-budget project, Tati finds it in him to create a poetic fusion between modernity and antiquity, and that is why Trafic remains great, if not at the heights of its predecessors.

Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972)

2010-03-17T16:58:00.005-04:00

I owe my recent viewing of Billy Wilder’s overlooked Avanti! to a perusal of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s top 100 favorite films. For whatever reason (I have yet to read a convincing one) it falls outside the bounds of the conventional Wilder canon and is rarely talked about or acknowledged. As it stands, Avanti! is a masterful evocation of time and place, an on-location shoot in Italy elevated by a lilting, melodic and romantic score that seems like something two-time Tati composer Alain Romans might have cooked up had he been under the breezy spell of the small by-the-shore town of Ischia, Italy, or perhaps Nino Rota in Amarcord mode. Grounded within this atmospheric seascape villa is the following premise: Jack Lemmon’s Wendell Ambruster, Jr. goes to retrieve the body of his dead father for a nationally televised funeral. When he meets the daughter of his father’s mistress, Ms. Piggot (Juliet Mills), things really get going, and Wilder takes great pleasure complicating the story until Lemmon simply can’t take anymore. It’s one of the better tourist comedies, not so much because Lemmon’s stiff-lipped, rude American finds it difficult to conform to the Italian rituals and customs, but because he is unwilling and ardently set on retrieving his father’s body to the exclusion of all else, and it is Mills who eases him into the charming serenity of the resort. Lemmon’s sense of urgency is combated at every turn by the leisureliness of the Italian lifestyle, and eventually he must settle into it and, naturally, fall in love with the perky Londoner. Likewise the 144-minute runtime allows the film to bask in its own grace and sweetness without any rush, and gives the audience all the time it could ever need to enjoy it.

Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)

2010-03-15T02:12:00.005-04:00

Belle de Jour is similar to That Obscure Object of Desire in the sense that our female protagonist withholds herself from her husband, but while That Obscure Object of Desire was deliriously consumed with Flabert’s desire for intimacy, Belle de Jour is a more serious work intent on Séverine’s desires, which she buries into her subconscious until they are only displayed in her dreams. That Obscure Object is more in Buñuel’s nihilistic comedy mode and while it is certainly a puzzling, dizzying film about sexual morality, Belle de Jour surpasses it for sheer psychological mystery.

The opening scene, which begins with a careful long shot of a distant horse-drawn carriage that slowly moves into close-up, is both emblematic of the enigmatic qualities of the film and leads me closer to charting out Buñuel’s style. It is a dream in which Séverine is brutally beaten by her husband’s coachmen after he infers from her introversion that she is cheating on him behind his back. This dream has many interesting implications—not only does she desire masochistic pleasure, but she also anticipates her eventual employment in a brothel and how conflictingly she feels about being found out—and it is also a bitterly realistic dream, lacking any of the usual surreal touches and focusing in abundance on the damp earth and tranquil scenery. I am also coming to understand the particularities of Buñuel’s relatively long-take style. Throughout the film there is an illusion of fixed space. The opening shot begins as a lengthy static shot before a sudden pan, and the camera often begins in a set position before it begins tracking or prowling or zooming in or zooming out, and it is always as if our initial perception of a set space is being encroached upon or distorted. The camera often pans between husband and wife or rotates around an axis between à la Contempt, and it also follows according to Séverine’s gaze à la Madame de…. Buñuel undoubtedly wields one of the most curious, voyeuristic cameras in film history.

There are snippets of flashback into Séverine’s past that I suspect have certain autobiographical flourishes for Buñuel, who was raised Catholic and then came to abandon the faith. All of his protagonists seem predetermined for certain sexual transfixions, and while Flabert of That Obscure Object is a grotesquely comedic example, Séverine is more fully realized and her flashbacks that depict a Catholic upbringing seem like Buñuel delving into his own childhood. Is Buñuel casting a moral light on Séverine’s decisions, either approvingly or disapprovingly? Her actions result in a violent disaster and yet Buñuel clearly looks on his heroine with profound affection. In what I now know to be typical Buñuelian fashion, the outcome of Pierre’s learning his wife’s fatal secret is given to us as a dream. Dreams are the means by which he approaches life and the means by which his characters either cultivate their desires or retreat into themselves.

That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)

2010-03-12T22:39:00.008-05:00

I began with Buñuel’s early Surrealist works and have now jumped over forty-five years ahead to the end of his career. Though his vehement anti-Catholicism and willingness to offend has always been offputting, I do admire, having seen That Obscure Object of Desire, the cohesion of his work, that he has the same touch of black comedy and erotic fascination that he did in both Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or. I also admire the puzzling moral positions of his characters, the respectable man who desires the virginal woman and what is entailed both by his passion and her refusal to giver herself completely to him. Desire factors in almost every decision for Flabert, played by Fernando Rey, who not only ardently yearns for Conchita, but who believes he can get what he wants by playing on the desires of others. Conchita ostensibly wants nothing, neither money nor sex, and she recoils when he attempts to buy her from his mother. When they are finally together as man and mistress, she denies him her flesh. Through this denial, she casts a peculiar light on Flabert that illustrates the savagery and foolishness of his pursuit and would seem to suggest that true love can only exist if the fulfillment of sexual desire is withheld. But instead, this prolonging becomes a spiral of jealousy, decay, and frustrating moral ambiguity. Played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, Conchita is endlessly mysterious and her temperament ever subject to sudden shifts and changes. She remains a virgin throughout, but her actions become ever more rash and hard to decipher.

It’s a thoughtful and enigmatic story, made all the more strange by the bizarre present-tense sequences, in which Flabert proudly tells his story to fellow train passengers, all of whom appear to be strange caricatures of respectable civilians. One of the first notable incidents in the film is Flabert’s pouring a bucket of water on Conchita’s head, and at the end of the film she reciprocates by doing the same to him, as if the brutal beating she endured the morning before was absolutely meaningless, and surely enough the two are soon back together yet again. The ending may provide some insight into this final absurdity, one that seems to communicate that their game will go on ad infinitum, by taking the theme of terrorism that has always been present, and using it to put an explosive end to everything. The shocking, freeze-frame ending, together with both the image of a woman mending a torn dress behind sound-proof glass and the soothing music that plays a moment after the loudspeakers announce an alliance between terrorist organizations, suggests that throughout all of Flabert’s and Conchita’s cat-and-mouse game, in which everything that has mattered is the immediacy of desire, they have been almost entirely oblivious to the real world, shrugging off encounters with violent radicals as if they were inconsequential impediments, and that perhaps all is arbitrary and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. With That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel appears less a provocateur and more a refined moralist, and I am ever more inclined to seek out more of his films.

An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957)

2010-03-12T02:18:00.010-05:00

Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, my second of his films after the heartbreaking Make Way for Tomorrow, affirms beyond all doubt his sincere love for and idealization of the couple, and he romanticizes to no end the affair between Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr until it loses the glossy lavishness of a sentimental fling and hopes to attain true longevity. As in Make Way for Tomorrow, McCarey details how the world conspires against the consummation of true romantic love, turning the couple into tabloid fodder or targets for derision. Only a beautiful, transcendent interlude, in which the couple visits Grant’s grandmother in France at a humble, secluded mansion that houses a chapel, far removed from the dimly lit glamour of the cloistered cruise-ship, assures them that they belong with one another forever. This is what makes the film; the scene exults a romantic Hollywood couple to a plane of spiritual togetherness. Instead of cautiously exchanging flirtatious double-meanings, they pray together in the chapel and share a wholesome time with the elderly woman, who shares all the dignity of Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi.

Of course their fateful meeting atop the Empire State Building is delayed, and what ensues might rub a few viewers the wrong way, perhaps as needless padding or cruel delay of what the audience has been waiting for. Especially perplexing is an entire musical number performed by the young children Kerr has come to teach at a small Catholic school. But McCarey must send his characters through a period of turmoil and humbling before they can effortlessly get what they desire, and it is moments like the corny children’s performance that provide much needed glimmers of joy that also serve as a personal mementos for McCarey, one of the most Catholic of directors. Grant’s torture, meanwhile, is depicted without a word; the camera lingers over him as he suffers the sights that marked the first stages of their love, and the fond memory of his grandmother’s piano playing that recalls that quaint nostalgic day they spent together provides one of the most convincing uses of music as gateway to sentimental remembrance that I have yet come across in a film. The final ten minutes, marked by jarring suspense, proceed along an awkward path of cautionary dialogue until in the last few minutes the unbridled force of the theme rushes out of the floodgates and drenches the screen in the purest of romantic love, and the final embrace takes place not atop the Empire State Building, but in a homely little room in a tucked away building.

McCarey’s innocent charm with which he paints Manhattan as a romantic snowcapped wonderland does more for me than all the gritty or intellectual imbuement customary of the most famous New York directors, among them Allen and Lumet. Meanwhile, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr’s performances are so fraught with turmoil, embarrassment and pathos, that they are immediately believable as the unlikely couple that meets by chance and falls in love, and McCarey allots equal care to both characters. The end result is a masterpiece I’m shocked to find drifting into low-tier McCarey and hokey romance canons.

Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976)

2010-03-11T00:25:00.008-05:00

Network is a good movie that goes down easy, more palatable than Lumet’s other prominent mid-seventies news media discourse, Dog Day Afternoon. Both are about sensationalism, how a troubled man with violent tendencies can become a crude populist attraction devoured by television and radio networks. But Sonny is a more convincing human being than Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch in his final performance as a raving lunatic news anchor, and Network’s over-the-top hyper-real satire, running amok with ratings-hungry executives and self-centered shareholders and all the now-typical clichés, pales in comparison to Dog Day Afternoon's restrained and focused character study. Network is problematically connected to the real world, beginning with the presence of actual television networks and continuing into the running commentary on ‘our times,’ bolstered both by the network's attempted negotiations with a leftist terrorist organization for a hit series and by Beale’s running commentary on politics and the economy. While Dog Day Afternoon humanizes what the media would objectify, Network achieves no such potency, and the result is a fun film weighted down by a self-important script. It seems to be at once bombastic satire and serious, real-world drama, and this inconsistency is to its detriment. Watching a scene of shrill, painful marital breakdown devolve into more of the same old satirical meta-awareness made me feel unforgivably toyed with, and character drama doubling as blunt, shallow exclamations about the coldness of networks and corporations continues throughout William Holden’s and Faye Dunaway’s side plot, though Holden’s Max Schumacher is sorely needed as a voice of sanity. There’s a reason Network was nominated for ten Oscars, and Billy Wilder’s similarly prophetic and far more ahead of its time film about the media’s marginalization of human beings for the sake of profits, Ace in the Hole, was nominated for but one. One might chalk this up to the wide gap between conservative fifties audiences and jaded seventies audiences, but the fact remains that this is a pop satire and very surface-level commentary that ultimately leaves the viewer without any powerful reaction, though perhaps with the illusion of one. But it’s fun, the cast is great, the New York feel impeccable, and it sure goes out with a bang.

Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938)

2010-03-09T22:14:00.008-05:00

The farther back we move into William Wyler’s career the more liberal he seems with camerawork and cinematography. The absence of deep focus in Jezebel leads to dramatic focal contrasts between foreground and background, and he still has a way with framing groups of people in the same shot. However Jezebel is one of the worst costume dramas I’ve seen, Gone With the Wind lite, where every heated moment gives way under the impenetrably thick, false Southern accents, and where every black character is comic relief. Wyler’s New Orleans also lacks much to distinguish itself. The opening dolly shot through a crowded market place is an excellent example of staging and is at least competent at lathering on some regional flavor, but it’s more or less dissociated from the rest of the film. Everything else takes place in manors and banks and ballrooms, and it’s rather interchangeable with the unspecified Georgia setting of Wyler’s The Little Foxes, although that particular film is a far more accomplished work of daring theatrical asceticism. Jezebel overreaches by drawing dubious parallels between Julie (Bette Davis) and the Biblical Jezebel, and the film is unsuccessful at keeping the primary character dynamics within a larger historical context. Maybe if I were to re-watch the film with subtitles I would have liked it more and wouldn’t have zoned out so much, but as it stands, this is my second least favorite Wyler so far.

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)

2010-03-07T01:12:00.013-05:00

Sans Soleil is an essay film that follows in the footsteps of F for Fake, a film made by Orson Welles about art forgery, which takes many detours and makes many references and plays with editing to make statements and connections without ever forming a complete whole. Chris Marker’s film is a more serious, wide-reaching, and conclusive travelogue that explores an endless array of philosophical and anthropological topics, but can be boiled down as an exploration of memory, and by extension history. It is about how videogames interpret reality through delirious imagery, television is a substitute for our dreams, a city is a monumental comic strip, a seemingly lifeless procession through a subway is its own symphony, and Pacman is the perfect graphic metaphor for the human condition. Just about every idiosyncrasy of Tokyo is a gateway into a cultural history that is at once made expansive and compressed. Everything can be connected or represented in a multitude of ways, and one feels that Marker’s juxtapositions and graphic parallelisms are but a few among infinite possibilities. He is interested in memory as a circular phenomenon as opposed to a linear one. I can finally see how Vertigo is a reference point for him, and his intensive analysis of it as it pertains to time and space describes the opening spirals as the perfect embodiment of a memory that is at once expanding outward and concentrated in a singular point, both moving along a fixed path and yet concentrically situated. The abstract and the specific are all swirled together in a grand symposium of humanity’s collective memory; two dogs prancing about on the beach on an overcast day cuts to a grand scale ceremony for the year of the dog, a few girls in kimonos exist to the exclusion of every possible apocalyptic catastrophe, and a transient ritual performed by a priestess, upon whose death it will dissipate forever, transpires in spite of the bombastic, Americanized city just two miles away. The film’s fascination with technology as a means of supplanting memory comes to a head in the ending, when our narrator peers into the year 4001, when perhaps nothing in history will ever be forgotten, and it is at this moment that all of history is neutralized and strung together in a fluid progression toward an arbitrarily marked, hypothetical pinnacle, and the concept of collective human experience becomes beautiful, exciting and poetic.

Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

2010-03-06T13:42:00.003-05:00

I found the viewing of Oliver Stone’s Platoon a truly reprehensible experience. The first half hour or so juts nice on-location wilderness shooting up against every war movie cliché and Vietnam War movie cliché specifically. There are horrible voice-overs, profanities over-emphasized as if the film were a 1970s holdover, the soldiers defined by how loudly they argue with each other, and there’s even an obligatory scene of that one soldier who’s showing off the photograph of his girl back home. Family, race, social standing—yes Platoon thinks it has something important to say about all of it. A lot of this was starting to thankfully wear off when the raid on the village sequence made me hate the film about fifty percent more vigorously than I did beforehand. Watching amoral American soldiers hold guns to little children’s heads, attempt rape on young women and crush a man’s skull with a rifle absolutely disgusted me, and it’s not the proactive form of disgust, which might result after a provocative, thought-provoking film that sets out to call my attention to a truly abhorrent real-world issue. Rather it’s a Vietnam war film, made well after the Vietnam war film was already its own subgenre, relying on cheap exploitation to make the audience feel petrified with shock and disgust, only to result in our young protagonist calling out his fellow animalistic soldiers and then in a dramatic long shot of the burning village, the accompanying operatic music meant to make us respond emotionally as only Oscar-hungry war movies can. As soon as the mean-old scar-faced sergeant Barnes murders noble Willem Dafoe and then lies about it, a plot twist so intent on making the audience cringe and accumulate hatred for the film’s posited villain, I decided I was going to disengage myself from the film completely. I knew it wasn’t worth caring about upon hearing all the hackneyed dialogue afterward: “I saw it in his eyes!” “Death? What do y’all know about death?” “There’s the way things ought to be and then there’s the way things are,” and the worst offender, “We did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy…was in us.” The closing monologue, intended to conjure up metaphysical ideas and feelings about the war, is one of the worst things I have ever heard and everything else is an action movie.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring (Ki-duk Kim, 2003)

2010-03-06T13:41:00.004-05:00

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is my introduction to Asian film of the past decade, and it makes me hungry for more. Not a masterpiece by any means, but a lovely storybook parable enhanced by lush nature photography and near-perfect visual storytelling; contemplative close-ups of statues, animals, and written figures, and placid long-shots of the temple resting on the lake and the surrounding wildlife. The title blatantly evokes the cyclical and seasonal nature of the film, which in turn indicates its Buddhist simplicity, and simplicity enhanced by lyricism is one of my favorite modes of filmmaking.

L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

2010-03-05T14:33:00.007-05:00

In the first scene of the L’Eclisse, when Vittoria (Monica Vitti) leaves her lover Ricardo, Antonioni alternates between framings that compress the space between the two and deep focus shots that maximize distance. Spatial proximity is Antonioni’s primary tool, and part of Vittoria’s existential crisis is reflected in the visual battle waged between natural forms and artificial ones, and whether the natural will dissolve into the artificial. This opening scene, then, creates ambiguous visual relationships between not only Vittoria and Ricardo, but also the couple and their environment. The remainder of the film will explore these relationships between human beings, and human beings and their environment in an increasingly modernized world.

The most initially striking element of Antonioni’s style is the ascetic approach to sound, wherein all is silent except for isolated noises manipulated to grate on the viewer by encroaching either on tranquility or sanctity. The roaring, ear-splitting sound of plane propellers puts short end to the momentary beauty of flight. A moment of silence held out of reverence for a recently departed associate at the stock market exchange is interrupted by ceaseless telephone ringing. Antonioni’s apprehension over how modern mechanics and architecture affects our daily lives seeps forth in every creaking door and blaring car horn.

In conjunction with isolated sounds is an assault on art and iconography, namely the reproductions of man and nature that would appear to equate them with objects. Photographs of Kenya, landscape paintings, wildlife wallpaper, and even a man’s crude sketches of flowers on a notepad establish this recurrent motif, and each time these reproductions appear can be argued to be an instance of grasping out at a natural world all too absent in the modern industrial ghost town of Rome. Vittoria searches the photograph of the Kenyan plains in vain for her friend’s farm, which is cut off by the restrictive framing, and the man who draws flowers in his notepad does so in miserable response to his losing 50 million lire in a stock market debacle. Vittoria is noticeably uneasy about making love in Piero's apartment, which is filled with busts and novelties that marginalize the human figure, all of which look grotesque in her eyes.

This argument that man and object are becoming interchangeable is fully communicated in two crucial lines of dialogue. The first is Vittoria’s statement that holding a man is like holding a pen or any other object, a statement that is made visually manifest when Piero (Alain Delon) finds himself, soon after Vittoria’s leaving him, among his desk pens, sitting erect in the foreground, every bit as prominent as he. The other arrives soon after Piero learns that his car, stolen the night before by a drunkard, had been driven into a lake. Expressing no sadness over the man’s death, whose mangled body he has seen draped across his wrecked automobile, he worries instead about the damage. Both the drunkard and the man tragically affected by the stock market are examples of strangers that Vittoria tries, in vain, to reach out to. Antonioni juxtaposes alongside his abstract statements about man’s collective dissipation in response to modernity more specific concerns over our inability to connect or empathize with other individuals.

L’Eclisse’s mise-en-scene is always full of blunt juxtapositions between dense, obstructive walls and pillars and the more lyrical beauty of the natural world. An early shot, which finds Vittoria in her apartment, positions her to the right of a massive wall, as she peers sadly out of a window at the trees blowing in the wind that populate the left half of the composition. As in the last shot of L’Avventura, the stone wall blocks out nature in its totality, replacing an immersive, picturesque image with a flat, imposing structure. Vittoria communicates to many people through windows and walls, and even the would-be intimate kisses she shares with Piero transpire on either side of glass doors, rendering the action an illusory mockery of the real act.

Vittoria’s and Piero’s relationship receives no closure, and their disappearance from the film may be said to be their immersion into the larger environment, that being a desolate area of the city inhabited by construction sites, streetlights, and apartment complexes. Antonioni calls attention the rigid trees pictorially transcribed onto these monumental structures, similar to how characters are often transcribed onto architectural fixtures or vice-versa. The finale of the film is one lengthy meditative montage surveying this eerie sector of the city. Axial cutting is used at two points for potent effects; the first gradually renders a portion of an apartment building abstract and lifeless, and the second begins with an extreme close-up of an old man’s face, every ridge and contour strikingly visible, and ends with his departure from the frame. The second to last shot presents a row of streetlights receding into the horizon. The one closest to the camera is positioned in such a way that the fluorescent light looms over the entire frame. The final shot reveals this to be the eclipse of the title, an eerie close-up of this artificial light that renders it as supreme light source, made all the more unsettling by the fact that I actually did mistake it for the moon upon first glance of the preceding shot.

In so many films, I tend to extract some sort of thesis the director is attempting to make and then move on after mentally applauding his skill. I see fascinatingly, but to no real provocative effect, that his visual style will tend to reflect his message. But in L’Eclisse, I was blindsided by Antonioni’s visual and auditory arguments, the formal elements of the film not merely reflections of a point already made clear in the narrative, but the entire substance of what he wishes to say. I feel that I did adopt Antonioni’s anxiety over the dehumanizing effects of modernity, and at some point it hit me that there is one moment at the beginning of the film when an electric fan caresses Vittoria’s hair, and that every subsequent shot of natural wind has it rattling metallic poles or blowing through wooden scaffolding. This observation, for whatever reason, sent a chill down my spine.

Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959)

2010-03-05T14:30:00.003-05:00

Shadows is my introduction to John Cassavetes, and perhaps my introduction to independent American cinema of this period. I was surprised by how ahead of its time it felt, its improvisations and overlapping conversations reminding me of Altman, while the brutal violence erupting from racial tensions and the glimpse of intellectual New York culture reminding me of Scorsese and Allen respectively. Sadly the DVD I viewed the film on was accompanied by horrible picture quality, which is hopefully remedied in the Criterion release. Even so, Cassavetes’ jumpy, freeform style is a wonder to behold, even in its awkward editing and unpolished sound. It’s a rough hodgepodge of beatnik culture and dingy Manhattan living, eruptive character relationships and existential angst, and it ends without any coherent finality, preferring instead to leave its characters waltzing forward to the beat of the saxophone solos.

Two by William Wyler: The Letter (1940) and Mrs. Miniver (1942)

2010-03-03T20:52:00.006-05:00

My Major Filmmakers class continues with these two films by Wyler, and while they are an arbitrary pairing, I like the contrast they provide between wonderful pulpy noir story and bloated wartime propagandist Oscar favorite. Made before Wyler became a name synonymous with deep focus cinematography, The Letter, even in its conventional noir trappings, is far more complex than the simpleminded Mrs. Miniver. A film about a married woman who murders her lover in a fit of passion and can only be convicted if a letter she wrote on the night of the murder enters the hands of the prosecution, The Letter has something interesting to say about the respected British citizens of Singapore and their feelings toward their native cohabitants. The glittery lavishness of the mise-en-scene and Max Steiner’s exotic score make them feel strange and otherworldly, while Wyler appears to implicate Davis’s character, part of whose motive was her rage over her lover’s daring to marry a native islander. Mrs. Miniver, meanwhile, conforms to a very banal ‘big picture’ model, depending on Theresa Wright’s perkiness, Greer Garson’s nobility, German caricatures, and pandering speeches about how it is everyone’s duty to contribute to the war effort, made by a priest no less, to rally the Allies in that particular moment in world history. Unfortunately, it is entirely hollow, and Wyler was right to conclude that his experience in the war gave him the proper experience necessary to make a truly relevant film about the effects of the war, The Best Years of Our Lives, which far surpasses the comparatively shallow exercise of Mrs. Miniver.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)

2010-02-27T17:55:00.006-05:00

Though I prefer Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the only other Fassbinder film I have seen, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant more greatly convinces me of Fassbinder’s talent as a filmmaker. It might possibly be the most visually ravishing of all films set for the most part in a single room. The bleak, somber tone achieved through many awkward conversational pauses, moments of anguish, and an absence of all but ironic music, the meticulous camera movements and frequent manipulations of the depth of focus that place the female characters in varying dramatic proximities to each other made me think it Fassbinder’s equivalent to Bergman’s Cries and Whispers of the same year. Its adeptness at telling its story about a lesbian fashion designer trying to transcend established norms and gain possession over an aspiring model seems to me more skilled than the melodramatic tale of love between an elderly widow and a young Arab. And yet The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is so predictably defeatist, Petra’s fate is locked from the outset, and as Jonathan Rosenbaum notes in his essay about the film, the enormous reproduction of Poussin’s Midas and Baccus that dominates a great quantity of the compositions serves from the beginning as a patriarchal rebuke to von Kant’s misguided attempts at liberation, at the same time the mannequins are ever-looming symbols of inhumanity and the absence of intimacy in Petra’s attempted conquest of Karin. The film is bitter to the core, reveling in Petra’s sadness and frustration only at the end to deny her even her servant Marlene, who relinquishes her docility only in the last minute when her mistress needs her most.

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

2010-02-27T01:26:00.006-05:00

If most of McCarey’s features are as powerful as Make Way for Tomorrow, then no doubt he will soon be among my favorite directors. What I find so amazing about this film is how emerging from so much sadness and neglect is the complete resurgence of premarital romance and infatuation, a period in marriage that I have been told never happens for some couples. The paradoxical development of a new love bursting forth from the most tragic of situations is achieved in large part through McCarey’s insistence that the viewer be subject to every stray moment of embarrassment or intimacy; when the former occurs without the security of the latter, as when Lucy infringes on her daughter-in-law’s bridge classes, the viewer cringes, but come the finale there is a marriage between the two that makes the couple seem so pure, innocent, and childlike in their love for one another. The film’s depiction of New York as seen through the eyes of the newly enraptured old couple has more wonder and romance than even Woody Allen’s famous Gershwin montage, and the final shot all the dragged out devastation of that which closes Truffaut’s The 400 Blows or Ozu’s Late Spring.

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

2010-02-25T01:57:00.008-05:00

The Blue Angel is at first glance a playful farce, taking a rigid, repressed, and respected professor (Emil Jannings), and dooming him to fall in love with a young, flirtatious cabaret dancer (Marlene Dietrich) at a burlesque house called The Blue Angel. Its first two acts alone are a travelogue of visual and auditory wonders, one the spatially fragmented club full of spiral stairways, trapdoors and a goldmine of exotic props and trinkets, and another the complete dissipation of sound upon the closing of doors or the shutting of windows. Yet it is also tragic, and one biting shot, one of the few in which Sternberg moves the camera, beholds the professor alone in his cavernous classroom after having been reported for his engagement to Lola. Hopes for a more dramatically involving movie would appear to be dashed with what ensues: a quick proposal and happy marriage that ostensibly reeks of love-conquers-all. But the professor’s spiral from college instructor to traveling showman, while ever hilarious, eventually erupts in a brutal sequence of events that involves the motif of the tragic clown and the revelation of his wife’s philandering, all of which return the wounded man back to his classroom in a shot that mirrors the earlier emotional cliffhanger, this time with a lyrical beauty that fully employs Sternberg’s reputable talent for gorgeous low-key lighting. What a wonderful film.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

2010-02-24T22:33:00.014-05:00

From the outset I was thinking there was no way I would like this more than Black Narcissus, but by the time it got to the passages about Candy’s German friend Theo, perhaps the film’s most sympathetic character, I realized that this was not only so much more than a propaganda film, but extremely gutsy (the British government largely disapproved of it). There is a sometimes veiled, sometimes clearly exhibited skepticism about the British military and government, and while the superficial tragedy may be that the honor and by-the-books approach of the British was becoming lost in the fight against the Nazis, as Candy remained fixed and unchanging, perhaps there is a hidden tragedy that this notion of British manners and rules was always an illusion. The scene in which Theo stands out as more experienced and as having more foresight than the entire mass of British politicians and generals is pretty audacious. Though Colonel Blimp is a fictional character, the film has the feel of a biopic, the irony being that this man feels more real than Patton, La Motta, and Mishima put together due to the Archers' frank and intimate approach to studying his life; rarely did they feel the need to make him ‘provocatively’ enigmatic or eccentric. I was taken aback by how overwhelming the ending was, how surprisingly gentle and transient the shot of a leaf floating in a pool of water when compared to the comic and theatrical extravagance of the rest of the film, and the resulting feeling that the viewer really has experienced the life of this man in full.